Looking south along The Tenmile Range during a fly-over of the Hidden Gems Wilderness Areas in Eagle and Summit County, CO. Hoosier Ridge on the left and a portion of the Tenmile Range are part of a proposed wilderness expansion under the Hidden Gems proposal.

Polis’ bill got backing at the news conference from Colorado nature photographer John Fielder and outdoorsman Aron Ralston, whose brush with death while hiking in Utah was portrayed in the Oscar-nominated movie “127 Hours.”

The bill would designate 167,000 acres in Eagle and Summit counties as wilderness and special management areas. Wilderness designation would prohibit mechanized vehicles and development in those areas.

“Only 5 percent of Colorado is designated wilderness, which is hard to believe,” Fielder said. “Only 3.5 million acres out of 66 million. That’s simply not enough.”

Kim Coupounas, the founder of GoLite outdoor apparel company, weighed in on the economic importance of protecting wilderness. “Americans spend money, generate jobs and support local communities when they get outdoors,” she said.

Ralston said that lower-elevation areas, like those in the bill, are sometimes overlooked in favor of Colorado’s more famous fourteener mountain areas.

“They’re areas that have been overlooked because they don’t have roads in them, they don’t have developed and popular mountain biking trails,” said Ralston, who estimates he has visited about 75 percent of the proposed areas in his work surveying with the Wilderness Workshop in Carbondale. “They’ve already been left to the wildlife. They’re so pristine, and we can keep them that way.”

Polis’ Eagle and Summit County Wilderness Preservation Act died last year without getting voted on. Since then, control of the House has switched to Republicans. But Polis said he believes he can still steer a wilderness bill through this year.

“My goal with this bill is that when any wilderness bill moves, we want this to be a part of it,” Polis said.

Polis’ action was endorsed Friday by four conservation groups that comprise the Hidden Gems Wilderness Campaign to get a larger amount of land designated as wilderness.

Polis’ bill includes a “nice chunk” of the public lands targeted by the Hidden Gems campaign, said Sloan Shoemaker, executive director of Wilderness Workshop.

Polis’ proposal doesn’t include any lands in Pitkin County because that is outside his district. The Hidden Gems advocates hope to get Republican Rep. Scott Tipton to introduce a separate bill establishing more wilderness in Pitkin and Gunnison counties.

County commissioners for Pitkin and Gunnison counties have endorsed the proposal. However, it’s opposed by a large contingent of off-road enthusiasts,

Polis said that in drawing up boundaries, they avoided some trails to allay objections from snowmobilers, whose activities would be banned in designated areas should the bill pass.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”

Three fundraising giants decided to pull events from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday, signaling a direct blowback to his business empire from his comments on Charlottesville’s racial unrest.